Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Momofuku's Soy Sauce Eggs

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I love eating out. If we
were rich, I swear, we would eat out every night—even though, yes, I love to
cook and, yes, that money would be better spent writing a big old check to
Partners in Health. I know.

Anyhoo, Momofuku is this incredible restaurant in New York,
where you wait in line for nine hours so that you can be hustled through the
most expensive meal of your life in twenty minutes. But, oh! That meal. We have
eaten things there—their famous ramen, their shrimp buns, a special octopus
salad—that I have thought about almost every day since eating them. That said, it’s not an ideal restaurant for
our strictly vegetarian Birdy, being largely porkcentric and kind of unapologetically
unaccommodating overall. However, Birdy did order a neon green cucumber salad
that was improbably good, and, also, this simple, briny pickled egg that
arrived beneath a thick shower of fried shallots.

I promised her I would try to make them at home, and now
I’ve made good on that promise and I can say that they’re dead-easy and just as
delicious as the ones we ate in the restaurant, maybe even more delicious given
that we’re using eggs from our neighborhood farm that have the kind of glowing
yolks that sing a song about grass and worms and sunshine. But there were a
couple store-bought eggs in one batch, and those were pretty effing good too.

Thanks to their killer umaminess, even Ben almost liked
them, and he has hated hardboiled eggs since he first tried one, at the age of
14 months, when he was fed a small piece and promptly unfurled his horrified tongue
back out of his mouth, with the egg still on it, the same way you would hold
your hand far away from your body if somebody happened to shit into it.

But this pickled egg he tasted, then shook his head, then
came back to taste it again, the way you do, when you can’t quite let go of
something. “That’s definitely the best hardboiled egg I’ve ever tried,” is what
he said. “It’s like weird, tangy Jell-o.”

Okay!

But he’s right, texture-wise. The boiling method and timing
produces eggs with perfectly firm whites and gelatinous yolks with a liquid
center.This is, as far as I’m
concerned, the ideal egg, and it’s how you get them at Momofuku. If you think
that’s not going to work for you, try cooking them a minute longer, but really—don’t
go for solid yolks or you’ll dim the magic. Trust me on this.

Momofuku’s Soy Sauce
Eggs

This is my version of Food52’s version, which is a version
of the version in Milk Bar Life. I
added the fried shallots, since that’s how we ate them at Momofuku. Serve these
as part of a bread board for dinner, or for breakfast, lunch, or a snack. Don’t worry if you run out
of shallots—the eggs are great without them too, although I bet that slivered scallions, crushed potato chips, and/or crumbled bacon would make great toppings too.

6 large eggs

1 tablespoon sugar

6 tablespoons water

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar

¾ cup soy sauce (the recipe recommends low-sodium, but you
can guess whether or not that’s what I used)

Neutral-tasting vegetable oil

1 shallot, halved lengthwise and sliced thin

Kosher salt

Half-fill a large pot with water, and bring it to a boil
over high heat.

Carefully lower the eggs into the boiling water (I do them
two at a time with a ladle) and boil them for 7 minutes (or, according to the
incomparable David Chang of Momofuku, for 6 minutes and 50 seconds), stirring
them for the first minute and a half (I think what that does is keep the yolk
from settling to one side, and it works really well.) Fill a bowl with ice and
cold water to prepare for the eggs being done.

While the eggs cook, whisk the sugar into the water in a
small bowl, then stir in the vinegar and soy sauce.

After 7 minutes, use a slotted spoon to move the eggs to the
ice water. When they’re cold enough to handle, peel them, and put them in a
container that they just fit in in a single layer. Pour the marinade over them
and refrigerate. The recipe says 2 to 6 hours and I, naturally, went for the
full 6. Remove the eggs to a lidded container and store in the fridge for—the
recipe claims, improbably—up to a month. You can reuse the soy-sauce mixture
for more eggs. I do.

When you’re ready to serve, fry the shallots. Heat a very
small pan over medium heat, add a big splash of oil (there should be enough oil
to cover the bottom of the pan) and fry the shallot, stirring constantly, until
browned and sort of fluffy-seeming, about 3 minutes. Drain on a
paper-towel-lined plate and salt them. (Use the extra oil for something: salad
dressing or stir-frying cabbage, say.)

Slice each egg lengthwise a top with a small shower of
shallots. If you skip the shallots for any reason, then sprinkle a little pinch
of coarse salt on the yolk before serving.

13 comments:

Momfuku and Milk Bar just opened here in DC! We're always many steps behind NYC with our restaurant scene; and David Chang is originally from Northern Virginia. I think I'll give the Soy Sauce Eggs a try per your recipe/recommendation, and let the hype die down before I venture forth to check it out. Also, I do like making Compost Cookies for special occasions (My husband and six year old daughter beg for them.).

Do you know how magic I thought you were? I looked at the photo of the sliced egg and thought the darker outside part was the shell. Like you were actually able to slice neatly through the shell and serve it in the shell, like a little bed. Then I figured out it was the soy sauce pickling that gave it that effect. Ha! I still think you are a little bit magic, though. --Cathy K

I'm with Amy3 on the solid yolks, but I'm also with her on the "for you, I'll try the 7-minute boil". The fried shallots alone must make these heavenly -- I could see myself making some extra shallots to add to a green salad, or just to munch on! Yum!

Oh, and also, please give Birdy our congratulations on her Honorable Mention in the current "Stone Soup"! My two girls and I love that magazine, and this month my husband piped up with some comments about a couple of the stories, so I guess he's been perusing it too! I wish we could see Birdy's artwork -- I bet WE would have published it if WE had been the editors of Stone Soup. :-)